


Settled

by rsadelle



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:05:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rsadelle/pseuds/rsadelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John gets off the bed and goes over to rub her bare shoulders. "Yes. Mind you, when I say he thinks we should have a baby what I mean is that he thinks the three of us should have a baby."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Settled

John stays with Harry for a few days, on the couch at Greg's new flat, at a cheap hotel. Sherlock may have taught him how to want a home, but the Army taught him not to need one. He stays over at Molly's, on a night when he takes over a bottle of wine and he gets drunk and they both cry. Molly, he thinks, is the only person who can come close to truly understanding how he felt - feels, will always feel - about Sherlock.

He cycles back to Molly's again and again. She lets him in every time, and he doesn't think either of them is that surprised when they start sleeping together. Sherlock's gone, but they're both here, and they both loved - love, will always love, he expects - Sherlock. Late at night in her bed, that's enough.

She asks him to stay.

*

They've been living together for eighteen months and talking about having a baby for eleven when Sherlock comes back. He does it as spectacularly and dramatically as he's ever done anything.

A&E is quiet on Tuesday afternoons, leaving John time to slip away for midafternoon tea in one of the lounges. Someone has the telly on showing some special news report that John doesn't pay attention to until he hears Sherlock's name.

Sherlock is back. Sherlock has cleared his name, condemned Moriarty and his entire web of criminality to the depths of hell or the punishment of prison, and returned. He has not texted John, or called, or visited.

"That utter bastard," John says. It gets him some strange looks from the other people in the room. He ignores them. He's used to strange looks, and he has to grip the counter to keep his leg from folding under him.

He says it again when he gets to the morgue and gives the news to Molly, keeping iron control over his temper to avoid shouting.

"He was protecting you," she says. "He was protecting us all."

John doesn't put it together, not until later when he's upstairs again and treating a patient.

"You knew," he says, quietly, when he meets Molly at the doors of the hospital to go home. "That's why you didn't want a baby. You were waiting for him to come back."

Molly takes his hand. "Can we talk about this at home?"

They hold hands as far as the Tube station - John hardly ever takes cabs anymore - before he uses the station as an excuse to let go. He can see Molly's point about not talking about it in front of the hospital, but he doesn't much feel like holding her hand. Years, and she knew, the whole time.

Sherlock is, of course, waiting on the landing outside the flat. They should probably be grateful he's not waiting in the flat, but John can't be grateful for anything, not just yet.

Molly walks right up to Sherlock and puts her arms around him. John pushes past them into the flat. If he's not mistaken, there's a bottle of Scotch in the back of the cupboard above the sink.

The bottle is right where he thought it was, and he splashes more than a shot into a glass.

"John," Sherlock says.

John tilts his glass, watching the last drops of Scotch roll around the bottom. "You left," he says. His voice comes out entirely calm. His hand doesn't so much as twitch. His leg is as steady as a rock. "You gave me a life, and then you left. And then I tried to build a new life, or sort of new. We've been talking about having children, you know." John glances up, only enough to see Sherlock watching him. "You probably do know, from the shirt she's wearing or how I part my hair. And all that time, she's been waiting for you to come back because she doesn't want to have a baby with me. Doesn't want to have anything with me, I expect."

"John," Molly says. Her eyes are wet. Even Sherlock was never cruel enough to make her cry.

"Completely wrong," Sherlock says.

John holds up his hand. "I don't want to hear it."

"But you're starting from several-"

"I. Don't. Want. To. Hear. It."

John has to pass by both of them to get out of the flat. Sherlock doesn't try to stop him. Molly reaches for him but doesn't connect.

*

"He came to yours then." Greg lets John into his flat. The other friend he made through Sherlock, but he probably gets to keep this one. "Want to get pissed?"

"God yes."

Greg pours him a drink, and leaves the bottle on the table so John can keep pouring.

He cries, later, when he's so off his head he'll have only vague memories of it.

*

John has a shift at the hospital early enough that he still feels like death warmed over.

"You look worse than our patients," one of the nurses says. Or maybe two of them. John's head is sore enough that he's having trouble keeping them straight, even after a handful of paracetamol and three cups of very strong, very black coffee.

He ignores Sherlock's fifty-three texts and Molly's two.

He would continue to ignore them, but he comes out of a trauma room at noon and finds Molly waiting for him. Her eyes are red, and there are dark circles under them. As angry as he is, he still wants to make her feel better.

"Please," she says.

They find an empty room, one that isn't on his floor or hers.

"I'm- I'm sorry," Molly says. "I'm sorry. I couldn't tell you. I promised him I wouldn't."

"The only thing I wanted was for him to be alive. You knew that. We live together. The nurses keep asking when I'm going to marry you. We were talking about having a baby together." John takes a deep breath. "What other secrets were you keeping?"

"No." Molly shakes her head. "No, nothing else. That was the only one. You know everything else." She's tearing up again. He's never seen her cry so much.

John rubs his forehead. "And you didn't want a baby with me."

"I didn't want a baby with someone who was going to leave me as soon as he came back."

John's head comes up. Sometimes, Molly's forthrightness startles him. "You think I'm going to-"

"Aren't you? You said all you wanted was for him to be alive. We live together and all you wanted was that."

John puts his arms around her and they stand there for a long few minutes until they both have to get back to their shifts.

*

John goes to Baker Street after work. He still has a key, not that Sherlock remembers to lock the door half the time.

Sherlock stands up when John enters the flat, and they stare at each other for what feels like forever - Sherlock would know how long - before John sits down in the chair that used to be his.

"Thank you," John says. He feels foolish saying it, but it has to be said. "All I wanted you to do was not be dead, and here you are."

Sherlock frowns at him. "You didn't want to have a baby without me here."

John opens his mouth to deny it, but closes it again. Sherlock isn't entirely wrong.

"And Molly thinks you'll leave her now." Sherlock nods. "That's settled then."

"Yes, right," John says, then, "No. What's settled?"

"We'll have a baby. Molly will have to move in here, obviously. We're not giving up Baker Street." Sherlock looks around the room. "The nursery will have to be upstairs. More defensible, and we meet clients here."

John laughs. "You're as mad as ever."

The look on Sherlock's face is the petulant one he always gets when John doesn't immediately give him whatever he wants. "I'm not 'mad.'" John can hear the quotes around it. "It's the obvious solution."

"Obvious? Sherlock, it's not obvious. It's absurd."

"I have just come back from the dead."

"You weren't really dead."

"Practically speaking," Sherlock says, "I was. I don't see how bringing a child into the world is any more absurd than that."

Of course he doesn't.

*

They fall into a holding pattern. John stays with Molly most nights, but he goes to Baker Street most days, and stays the night there sometimes, in the bed he still thinks of as his. Some of his things - a jumper, his laptop, the book he's reading - begin to migrate back to their places at Baker Street.

Sherlock brings it up at intervals that appear random but probably adhere to some sort of schedule of his own devising designed to most effectively get John to agree with him.

They solve seven cases, John takes down a kidnapper with a well-aimed punch but doesn't shoot anyone, and Sherlock is even more gentle with Molly in the morgue than John is.

*

"Sherlock thinks we should have a baby," John finally tells Molly.

Molly pauses in the act of taking off her shirt. "He does?"

John gets off the bed and goes over to rub her bare shoulders. "Yes. Mind you, when I say he thinks we should have a baby what I mean is that he thinks the three of us should have a baby."

Molly turns under his touch. "Would you?" She puts her hand on his cheek, the other on his shoulder, the bad one because she doesn't worry about hurting him anymore.

John backs away from her. "People don't have babies in threes. Threesomes. You know what I mean."

"People don't come back from the dead."

"He wasn't dead!"

"He might as well have been." Molly puts her hand on his cheek again. "Would it be so bad?"

John steps out from under her touch again. "You've never lived with him. He'd be a disaster for a baby."

"Neither one of us would let anything happen."

"Do you really think we have the power to stop him?"

"Yes."

*

"What did he do now?" Greg opens a second bottle of beer and hands it over.

"Both of them." John sinks down onto Greg's couch. "They want to have a baby."

Greg pauses with his beer bottle halfway to his mouth.

"They want the three of us to have a baby," John clarifies. It doesn't do anything to make Greg look at him any differently. "It's mad, right?"

Greg's bottle completes the journey to his mouth. "They did fake his death."

John groans and puts his head in his hands. "Greg, you make a living logically piecing together cases. Could you please be a voice of reason?"

"Reason," Greg says, "doesn't usually have a place when it comes to Sherlock."

*

"Take-away?"

"Unless you want to do the shopping." Molly closes the fridge and turns away from it. She leans into John's side for a moment.

He kisses her hair, and lets go when the doorbell sounds.

It's Sherlock, of course, with a plastic bag in one hand. He unpacks the cartons of take-away onto the kitchen counter and unerringly opens the cabinet with the plates in it.

"You brought us take-away." John doesn't quite make it a question.

"Yes, obviously."

There has to be some reason for it, but John's hungry enough to eat instead of questioning Sherlock any further.

"Leave that," Sherlock says after dinner, when John is rinsing plates in the sink.

"If I leave it," John says, "one of us will only have to deal with it later."

"John," Sherlock says. "Leave it."

John turns away from the sink to look at him. "Why? Sherlock, what's going on?"

"Molly is ovulating."

John stares at him in disbelief. No, not disbelief, really, not when it comes to Sherlock. He rubs his face with his hands. "Sherlock."

"Please," Molly says.

John turns to look at her.

"John, I've said yes. I'm saying yes. It's only you we're waiting for."

"This is madness!"

"Your hand is steady," Sherlock says.

John looks down at it. Not a tremble in sight. He lets his hands drop to either side. There is no more avoiding it. "What Mycroft said," he says to Sherlock, ignoring the grimace at Mycroft's name, "that time at the palace-"

"Honestly, John, I'm not _afraid_ of sex." Sherlock looks to the side as he says it.

"There's a chair." Molly crosses the kitchen and takes John's hand. "You can sit there."

There is a chair. On nights when nightmares about Afghanistan or Sherlock don't let him sleep, John sits in it and watches Molly's untroubled face.

Sherlock takes the chair now, and Molly takes John to bed.

He can't forget Sherlock sitting there, watching them, but he chooses not to let it bother him. He focuses on Molly instead, on getting them both undressed, on kissing her as they climb into the bed they've shared for nearly two years.

"This is a bit mad, isn't it?" It's Molly who says it, smiling anyway and pushing him down onto the sheets.

"Absolutely mad," John agrees. He cups the curve of Molly's arse, kisses her, strokes her. Does not think about Sherlock watching them. Does not think about anything but Molly sliding wet and warm onto his bare cock.

Does not, that is, until Sherlock says, "You'd best wait for that," when he moves his hands down Molly's body. "Female orgasm best aids conception one minute before to forty-five minutes after ejaculation."

John's groan is not a pleased one. "Sherlock, stop. That is not sexy."

One of Molly's hands leaves his body, and John looks up to see her holding it out to Sherlock. "You can come here and talk to me."

John closes his eyes and listens to the rustle of cloth as Sherlock does just that. When he opens them again, it's to Sherlock kneeling behind Molly, holding her body against his. John catches very few of his words, which is for the best given what he's already tried to contribute. It's working on Molly; John can tell by the way she's moving against him. The angle Sherlock has her body at won't let her come. What John knows from experience Sherlock has probably figured out with physics and biology.

John looks decidedly at Molly, at the way she's riding him, at the stretch of her neck tipped back.

"Come on, John," Sherlock says. "You're making a lady wait."

"If you'd stop being a dick about it-"

"Don't," Molly says, gasps. "Don't fight. Just, please. Please, John."

"Yes, please, John," Sherlock says, as crisp as if they're discussing whether or not he wants tea.

John thrusts up into Molly, and again. It's almost enough, and then she touches his chest and Sherlock props his chin on Molly's shoulder and watches him with the same intensity he brings to his cases.

John squeezes his eyes shut as he comes. He doesn't see what Sherlock does to Molly, but he feels it, both in what it does to her and in the brush of of his fingers on John's softening cock. Biology, he thinks when Molly comes, and physics.

He opens his eyes in time to see Molly twist around and kiss Sherlock. It's messy, because of the angle, he thinks, more than the strangeness.

John sits halfway up - Molly makes a noise at the movement - and takes his turn, kisses Sherlock over her shoulder. Sherlock allows it, and smiles at the end of it, when the fatigue in John's muscles draw him back down to the bed. Molly comes with him, lies next to him.

Sherlock's coat is in the hall, his jacket draped over the back of the chair, but he's still dressed but for those two things. His cuffs are still buttoned. He lies on Molly's other side, feet crossed at the ankle, hands pressed together beneath his chin.

"Not going to contribute to the effort?" John asks. "This was your idea."

"The structure of the human penis is such that it displaces previously deposited semen."

John and Molly both stare at him.

"It would be best if I wait a bit," Sherlock continues after a moment. "To give your genetic material a fair chance."

"Right." John flops one arm over his eyes. He's knackered anyway. "You're crap at pillow talk."

There's a rustle of cloth that John chooses to ignore and the comfortingly familiar sound of Molly's breath slowing.

"You'll have to move into Baker Street soon," Sherlock says far too soon for anyone to be disturbing the afterglow.

"What?"

"Assuming this or a subsequent effort is a success, you'll want to avoid the strain of moving while more than a few weeks into the pregnancy. You'll have to leave most of the furniture, of course, but that's hardly a loss."

"You want me there?" Molly asks.

There is such raw longing in her voice that John opens his eyes and turns so he can see her.

"It's the only solution that makes sense," Sherlock says.

"Of course we do." John puts his hand on her cheek. "I love you."

Instead of any of the responses he expects that to garner - the words said back to him, a kiss, a smile - Molly closes her eyes and turns her head away from him.

"That's the first time you've said that to me," she says, "since he came back."

It can't be. No. Surely he's said it since then. He tries, but can't think of a time.

John leans down and kisses her, coaxing her back to him. "I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I do. I do love you."

Molly wraps her arms around his shoulders. "John."

"He's telling the truth," Sherlock puts in.

Molly opens her eyes and looks at him. "How do you know?"

John braces himself for an onslaught of deductions, but Sherlock says only, "I know John."

Molly smiles at him, kisses John.

John kisses her, strokes her hair, runs his hands down her body, says, "I love you," into her neck.

"Love you," Molly whispers.

John knows, after almost two years, how Molly likes to be touched, how to show her that he does love her, that he knows her and loves her, that his heart has space for more than just Sherlock.

When it gets to the point that they would normally be going farther than just touching, Sherlock interrupts with a hand on John's shoulder. "John," he says, and John cedes the playing ground to him.

Molly's smile for Sherlock is half pleased and half uncertain. Sherlock kisses her, which brings it all the way to pleased.

John doesn't expect that Sherlock has much experience with this, but he's Sherlock. He makes everything look graceful and practiced, even shimmying out of his trousers and pants while Molly unbuttons his shirt.

They're gorgeous together, Sherlock all long lines and Molly smiling. Sherlock moving into her like nothing else could be more natural and Molly stroking his chest with the kind of reverence John never gets from her.

"Please," Molly gasps after a while, and Sherlock's voice is uneven when he says, "No. Not until after I've ejaculated."

John almost laughs, because Sherlock's pillow talk still leaves much to be desired, but Molly grips Sherlock's face and kisses him, and it's not as funny then. It's bloody fantastic.

John has never seen Sherlock as undone as he is in the moment he comes. It's something of a comfort to know that even Sherlock needs a minute to recover, although it is only a minute before he puts his hands on Molly and makes her come. Biology, physics, and experience this time.

"Stay there." Sherlock puts his hand on Molly's stomach as he pulls away. "You're more likely to conceive."

"Not sexy," John says, even though it's done nothing to his erection.

Sherlock looks at him with narrowed eyes. "You've done this before," he says.

"This? No. I can reliably say that I have never before gone to bed with my lover and my best friend for the purposes of conception."

"Lovers," Sherlock says, "one of whom happens to be your best friend. You have gone to bed with," he says the phrase as if he finds it distasteful, "men before."

"Yes," John says. "Lesbian sister, open-minded parents, and the Army. I've experimented."

Sherlock looks at him for another long moment. Then he leans over and swallows John's cock down to the root.

"Oh, God," John says. Sherlock does this like an expert.

Molly puts her hand in Sherlock's hair. It makes him make a noise that does amazing things to John's cock.

John puts one of his hands in Sherlock's hair too. Sherlock leans into it without changing any of the suction on John's cock.

"God," John says, "you're amazing. Brilliant. Wonderful."

Sherlock manages to convey "of course I am" without changing anything he's doing. It's well-deserved; John has only the barest amount of time to enjoy the blow job before he's coming down Sherlock's throat.

"My God," John says. "That was incredible." He reaches for Sherlock, doesn't let him get far without touching him, stroking his shoulders and his back. "You're one orgasm down."

Sherlock makes a dismissive noise and pulls away to lie down on the other side of Molly. "That's not the measure of success for this encounter."

John thinks better of it but asks, "Do you not like sex?" anyway.

"Not," Sherlock says after a moment, "the way other people do."

"You don't do anything the way other people do," John points out.

Molly turns onto her side, curling up next to John. "Leave it." She kisses his cheek. "This is lovely. Don't ruin it."

John leaves it, and doesn't ask if Sherlock is staying.

*

"Good morning, dear." If Mrs. Hudson is surprised to see Molly joining them at the table, she doesn't show it. "Three for breakfast then?"

"Yes," John says, "if you don't mind."

"Just this once, dear. I'm your landlady, not your housekeeper."

"Mrs. Hudson," Sherlock says, and John can see the trainwreck coming before he finishes the sentence, "Molly will be moving in."

"Oh, how nice." Mrs. Hudson smiles at all three of them. "You'll be upstairs with John, then."

"The three of us will be downstairs," Sherlock says. "The nursery will be upstairs."

Mrs. Hudson claps her hands together. "A baby. How wonderful, dear." She positively beams at Molly. "Now, don't you get any ideas. I'm your landlady, not your nanny."

John expects she'll be watching the not yet confirmed as conceived baby more often than not.

*

Although Sherlock named himself John's lover, they don't often engage in anything that might be termed romance. Outside of bed, they don't touch any more than before. There are no good morning kisses or good night kisses, or any other kind of kisses for that matter. They don't exchange endearments or I love yous.

The closest they come are nights when Sherlock comes to bed, pushes John to the middle - there are no usual places in a bed shared with Sherlock and any one of them is likely to end up in the middle on any given night - and presses himself as close as possible, touching John everywhere he can. Those nights, John turns to Sherlock and holds him close, lets Molly's warmth be at his back. He does not say, "I love you," but he thinks it so fiercely he imagines Sherlock must absorb it from his touch.

*

"She's in pain," Sherlock says, more wild-eyed than John would have expected. "Do something."

"She's giving birth." John rubs Molly's shoulders, kisses her temple. "That's it, love." To Sherlock he says, "It's painful."

"Make it less so!"

"No," Molly says. "No drugs. I'm doing this on my own."

Sherlock paces the length of the room, his long strides eating up the space and his coat swirling around him at every turn.

"Sherlock," John says, voice as tight as the grip Molly has on his hand, "if you're going to be useless, you can leave."

Sherlock whips around, stares at them without seeming to see them, and then suddenly deflates into a mere mortal. He shucks his coat, drapes it over the the chair with John's, and climbs into bed to sit behind Molly. He lets her lean against his chest, her sweaty hair on his God only knows how expensive shirt. Only the posh blokes, John thinks, don't care about that sort of thing.

He's useful, though, and surprisingly good at helping Molly bear through it. John sees the look on her face near the end, when the contractions are coming close together, when she's waiting for the doctor to let her push, and how it eases, just a bit, with Sherlock's presence at her back and John's hand in hers.

Watching her hurt is agony, but the baby cries. The baby cries, the doctor says, "It's a girl," and Molly pushes Sherlock out of bed to go with their daughter while John holds her hand through the afterbirth.

Sherlock brings their daughter to her, with an expression on his face too displeased for a man holding the baby whose existence was, after all, his idea. "Mycroft is going to be insufferable," he says as he puts her in Molly's arms.

John looks down, and that is very clearly Sherlock's nose in miniature on their daughter's face. It's no less beautiful on her.

"Do you have a name for her?" the woman holding a clipboard of forms asks.

"Carrington," Sherlock says.

John looks up from his utter fascination with their daughter to make a face at him. "That's awful. She'll be mocked mercilessly."

"She'll be mocked mercilessly regardless," Sherlock says. It doesn't seem to bother him. "She can be Carrie if she wants to appear ordinary."

"Why not give her a sensible name to begin with?"

"Carrington," Molly says. "Carrington Hooper Watson Holmes. Separate words, not hyphenated."

John admits defeat. "Hello, Carrington," he says. Molly lets him lift their daughter out of her arms. "I'm your dad. One of them. I'm going to be forever overruled by these two on all matters relating to you."

"If you would just agree with us to begin with," Sherlock says, "you wouldn't be upset by it."

John can't help but smile, and he leans over, holding their daughter carefully, to kiss Molly.

**Author's Note:**

> References for Sherlock's conception facts:
> 
> Kelleher K. Odds of Conception May Be Better If Sex Is Good for Her. Los Angeles Times. 1996 Feb 19.
> 
> Gallup GG, Burch RL, Zappieri ML, Parvez RA, Stockwell ML, Davis JA. The human penis as a semen displacement device. Evolution & Human Behavior. 2003 Jul;24(4):277-289.


End file.
